WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN - by Elizabeth Baer

I exhaled, I sighed, and I smiled.

As many times as I’ve been to Italy, as much time as I’ve spent in Rome, when I arrived on my own this past June and sat down on the tiny terrace of my hotel room, the corners of my mouth turned up. Though it was not a hotel I had visited previously, nor a neighborhood I knew, I felt a sense of homecoming.

I first encountered Rome as a 12-year-old, when my parents decided to spend a month in a villa we rented in Fano on the Adriatic. We landed in and departed from Rome and spent a few days in the city on either end of the trip, and I even remember my first meal in the city, at a restaurant in Piazza Navona, before it became the tourist trap it is today. My next time in Rome was for a semester during college, to study the ancient city, at a program lovingly called the Centro. That is when I really learned the city. Over the years I have guided family, friends, and, during my time as a Latin teacher, students around Rome and to other parts of the peninsula.

Arrival at Fiumicino this time could have done me in, fraught with an endless (both in length and time) snaking line to get through immigration and another for a taxi. But even the taxi into the city felt relaxed and familiar. It didn’t hurt, of course, that I could chat just a bit with the taxi driver who, when I said my Italian wasn’t very good, exclaimed “Dai!” saying in one word something like, “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s great!”

As I sat on the terrace, cooling off, and in the fog of jetlag, I reveled in how the comfortably familiar felt new. Throughout the course of my time in Italy, that theme brought me great joy and led me to so many places I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

The impetus for this trip, and the reason I would even consider Italy in summer, was the 60th anniversary of the Centro, a study abroad program for students majoring in Classics that I attended when I was in college. My friend, Lily, who attended the same semester I did, would be joining me, but she didn’t arrive until the next day, so on my own I set out to explore the neighborhood.

As many times as I’ve been in Rome, there’s always a surprise around the corner. In the Celio neighborhood where we stayed, I found my way to an ancient boat sculpture of unknown provenance, and some other random ruins at a random intersection, one of the delightful traits of this city. More grand and established were Case Romane del Celio, the neighboring Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the nearby, relatively new Museo della Forma Urbis. I’ve passed by more fragments of the ancient city over the years than I can count, and all the pieces I saw remind me that the old city will ever offer something new to me.

And then I hopped on the bus. Entirely familiar and entirely new. Back when I spent the semester here in Rome as a student, the Metro was practically nonexistent within the historic center. You pretty much cannot put a shovel down in the city without encountering ruins and artifacts, and so constructing the Metro, constructing anything, really, requires far more time as every site needs to be excavated carefully and fully documented before work can proceed. As a consequence, the program provided us with bus passes every month of our stay, and we became quite comfortable and at ease on the city buses, familiar with the routes. Back in the old days, you needed to find a tabaccheria to buy your ticket, and then you had to validate it when stepping on the bus (unless you had a pass). Now you can just step on the bus and tap the screen with your credit card, phone, or even your watch as I do.

The afternoon offered the modern and the ancient, as well. After visiting the Centro della Fotografia Roma for a fabulous exhibit in one of the old slaughterhouses in Testaccio, despite the heat, I took the bus to see the Pons Fabricus, then I just had to wander through the Jewish ghetto. The church whose entrance is framed by the Portico of Octavia was open — I’d never found it open, never been in there — so I stepped in, out of the sun, to the smell of smoke and incense. More layers of the city.

The next day brought me into the belly of the beast that is tourism in Rome in the summer. For years I’d been wanting to see the relatively new Vicus Caprarius, near the Trevi Fountain. To escape the crowds in the so-called streets – in the area of the ancient Campus Martius, we might deem them alleyways – I ducked into the La Rinascente department store on Via del Tritone to see the remnants of the Aqua Virgo in the basement. The water source that ran through this aqueduct in ancient times still supplies water to this area, famously to the Trevi fountain. The old ruins offer quite the juxtaposition with the housewares section of the store.

Throughout my time in Rome, as part of the events of the Centro celebration, I visited so many new old things. There’s always a new excavation, a new museum. We have nothing comparable at home, but still, feeling so much at home in that place, reminds me to seek out what’s new, the things I haven’t done in my own neighborhood.

Still, there’s an impetus not to return to the same place over and over again, to explore new places, to broaden your horizons, one of the great benefits of travel. Although I bookended my trip with places I had visited previously, in the middle I got to experience an entirely new place.

My college friend, Dorothy, divides her time between Brixen in Südtirol in the far north of Italy where she is a professor of anthropology, and Matera in the south, in Basilicata, where she and her husband, Antonio, raised their children, and where he runs the two hotels they own. I had been wanting to see her place up north for some time, and this interlude didn’t disappoint.

As I took the very local train between Bolzano and Brixen, some announcements were in three languages. I was expecting the Italian and the German; I didn’t know about the more endangered Ladino (not to be confused with the Sephardic Judeo-Spanish language of the same name). This region leans heavily into its Austrian and German heritage, but, thankfully, everyone understands Italian. I haven’t used my very limited German in forever.

Dorothy asked what I might want for dinner, and I opted for anything typical of the region. At the restaurant she chose, she guided me to the traditional Südtiroler Tris plate: 2 types knödel, called canederli in Italian, and schlutzkrapfen. The knödel in particular represent that region’s way of using leftover bread, something familiar to me in my culinary life, but in a new form. Through so much of human history, and in many places still today, poverty and want mean that not a crumb can be wasted. A well-known concept in a new form for me. My one full day in Brixen was spent strolling the historic center, charming and entirely new, Italian but not really.

Then it was back the theme of this trip – seeing something new in the familiar. Dorothy and I drove to Matera together as it was the end of her university term. When I first visited her in Matera in 2000, some parts of the most ancient parts of town were still quite rough, and the city quite unknown to most tourists, but Dorothy and Antonio had begun work on a hotel. By the time of my second visit in 2008 their hotel, Locanda di San Martino, had opened, where most of the rooms are old caves which once served as homes for the populace. This is an extraordinary place to stay, and Matera is really worth a visit. Returning again echoed my arrival in Rome – my entire being felt a kind of sigh of recognition and familiarity, sitting just outside my room, gazing out over the sassi. Technically, the Italian word sasso means rock, but in Matera, the plural, i.e., sassi, refers to the districts where cave dwellings were carved into the rock faces of the ravines of the town.

Archeological finds have shown human habitation in the sassi as far back as the 13th millennium bce. Today dwellings and other structures, the labyrinth of streets and walkways, offer beautiful photo opportunities around every corner. Of course it was not always this way. While there are still plenty of economic challenges for the area, the conditions were once much more dire. Carlo Levi, when exiled to this region, famously exposed the crippling poverty and despair in his famous work, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). In the sassi, families were still living in caves carved into the rock face of the ravine, often with livestock, and the standing water at the bottom of the various ravines was breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying malaria, and other diseases tore through the communities as well. You can still see painted on a wall the indication of pesticide use by the government in 60s.

In the 1950s and 1960s there was a forced evacuation out of the sassi and the inhabitants were moved to government-built housing outside the city. Although safer and cleaner, this was tremendously disruptive to the lives of those affected, of course. After a time, the abandoned areas became rather seedy and dirty. Some people began squatting in the sassi, whether as a kind of counterculture rebellion of sorts, or in order to get into government subsidized housing.

Eventually that began to change as people recognized the magical aura of this unique place, even if the caves themselves are not well-suited to the expectations people have for a modern life.

On my own (while Dorothy had papers and exams to grade) I just strolled the sassi, getting lost, but not really. I wouldn’t really know where I was, and then I’d happen upon a piazza or a vista that was exactly as I remembered it from an earlier visit. Between museum visits, historic sights, and local churches, most with exhibits or new discoveries since my last visit, this sojourn deepened my understanding of this region’s history, varying widely from its time connected with the Greek Magna Graecia colonies in the 8^th century bce to its recent history of gentrification and growth as a tourist destination.

With such a long and interesting history of habitation in the area, about a year and a half ago, after many years of research and work on Antonio’s part, they opened a second hotel in the sassi, ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ, which pays homage to the earlier history of Matera and the region, from both before and during the Magna Graecia period. (In fact, there are two areas in Italy, one in Puglia and the other in Calabria, where a form of Greek is still spoken.)

I got to experience both hotels during the course of my time in Matera, the familiar Locanda di San Martino, and the newly-opened ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ. This newer hotel provides guests with an experience in experimental archaeology, a field which aims to recreate aspects of life from earlier cultures based on actual texts and artifacts, as a way to understand better the lives lived by those before us.

The attention to detail at the ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ is extraordinary. The staff do not merely check you in at the front desk. They have studied in those fields that relate to this endeavor — e.g., archaeology, anthropology, etc. — and they explain the historical context and present rituals you can experience during your stay. Each room is decorated with period reproductions, and while there are the modern conveniences you’d want and expect (bathroom facilities, climate control), you do feel you have a window into the past.

In addition to the décor, each guest is given a chiton, an ancient Greek item of clothing, and the staff perform two evening rituals at the ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ. The water ritual presents a dramatic rendition of the story of Demeter and Persephone, most of which was in Italian (that I could easily follow between my Italian skills and my knowledge of the myth), but some of which was in Ancient Greek, and that, of course, delighted me greatly. Later we had the symposium ritual, when each table had an array of snacks, all of which were foods common in the ancient Greek world, such as cheese, olives, dates, and nuts. We were poured wine as part of the ritual, and partook of food and drink as the staff again performed with music and choreography to bring the guests a rendition of an event at which Greeks would have found themselves.

My last evening in Italy was a lovely dinner at a local restaurant with Dorothy and Antonio and friends of theirs. After dinner, walking through the main piazzas of town, I recalled the passagiate from previous visits, but this time, we were doing so at at 11:30pm and the streets were packed. Not only young people, but also families with young children were all out for a passagiata or dinner at tables outside. The local Bruna festival (the big town festival on July 2) would be in a few days, and everyone was getting into the celebratory mood, with the historic center of the city fully decorated with thousands upon thousands of lights, strung upon buildings and temporary structures. I had experienced a local festival two years prior in Gubbio, and even though I would miss the actual festival day, a magical last night in Italy allowed me to revel in another quintessentially Italian hyper-local observance, familiar and new all at the same time.